For fuck’s sake, Lou thought, irritated at herself. This is who I am now. I’m the woman who’s turned off by dust.
‘Seriously, Josh,’ she said. ‘Come and look at deck porn with me. It might get you off.’
He stopped undoing his pants, looked for a moment like he might sulk. But then he shrugged. ‘Night Garden’s not long enough for one of my epic performances anyway,’ he said, and came over to lie beside her, dirty jeans and all, and held out his hand for the phone.
The thing was, Lou thought, as she pointed out blistering paint finishes and weather-proof fairy-light streamers, she just couldn’t see Josh right now. She could see this baby, and the one downstairs, and she could see what needed doing at work on Monday, and she could see the before-birth to-do list sitting in her computer. Lying on her side, she pushed her big belly into Josh, and he smiled and put his hand on it. ‘Hello, bump,’ he said, his voice thick with warmth.
You’ll come back, she thought. You’ll come back into focus, when I have some space to see the sky through the trees. Can you hold on till then?
Josh
A few days later
Josh unwrapped the tea towel from around his middle finger and watched a bright stream of blood pour into the kitchen sink.
‘Lou,’ he called over his shoulder, ‘I think it needs a stitch. I’m going to have to go.’
‘Fuck,’ Lou called from the next room. ‘Gretchen’s picking me up in an hour.’
‘I know, babe, but . . .’ Josh peeked under the tea towel again. ‘A bandaid’s not going to fix it.’
‘Daddy! Let me seeeeeeee.’
Stella came rushing into the kitchen, practically skidding on the tiles, all knees and elbows and dark hair flying.
Lou followed her in. Walking slowly – Josh wouldn’t dream of saying waddling, even in his head – a towel wrapped around her, her belly pushing at the thinning blue cotton.
‘I haven’t been out in forever,’ she was saying. ‘This is typical.’ And then she saw the blood on the draining board, and she went white. ‘Oh.’
Josh bashed up his fingers at work often enough to be able to judge when bleeding was going to stop, and he knew this wasn’t going to be stopping any time soon.
‘I’ll be as quick as emergency will let me be,’ he said, pulling the tea towel bandage as tight as he could. ‘Promise.’
‘Give me a second to get dressed,’ Lou said, turning back to the door. ‘You can’t drive, you idiot.’
Idiot was a bit rich, Josh thought. The deck he was trying to build was Lou’s dream, after all. And a one-man project of that size was always going to result in injuries; it was inevitable.
He’d been ‘saving’ spare boards from his jobs for months, ever since they’d moved into the new house, to get the outside area Lou was picturing underway. And over the Easter break, he’d been trying to get a proper start on it, but that was hard with Stella wanting to be involved in everything these days, and Lou so tired all the time.
‘I can drive with a sore finger, Lou,’ he said. ‘I’ve done it before.’
‘That’s a bit more than sore,’ Lou called from halfway up the stairs.
‘That’s big ouchy, Daddy,’ said Stella.
‘Get your shoes on, Stella!’ Lou shouted.
‘Shoes, shoes, shoes,’ Stella echoed, and started turning in circles. Like a puppy, thought Josh.
His finger was beginning to throb. Fuck fuck fuck. This was the last thing he needed.
He tried to mop up some of the blood from the floor, his injured hand in the air, crouching and swiping at the scarlet mess with a dishcloth in his good hand. Blood so stark against the newness of the white floor lino.
Everything in this house was so fucking shiny.
‘Yuck, Daddy.’ Stella was watching him. ‘Yuck.’
‘Go find your shoes, Stell,’ Josh said. ‘They’re near the front door.’
‘Door, door, door,’ Stella carolled as she wandered out of the kitchen. ‘Knock, knock, knock.’
Josh knew there was zero chance of going out into the hallway and finding their two-year-old daughter waiting patiently by the door with her coat and shoes on. He really wanted to drive himself to the hospital; it would be so much easier on every front.
But the tea towel was turning red and he was beginning to feel a bit dizzy. Shit.
He heard Lou coming back down the stairs and headed towards her. She’d pulled on what she referred to as one of her ‘tent dresses’ to cover her bump, and her wet hair was hanging around her shoulders. ‘If we can wait for Gretch she could sit with . . .’ she was saying, but she stopped when she saw Josh’s face. ‘Don’t worry, let’s go.’
It took another five minutes to cajole Stella out to the car and persuade her to be strapped into her seat. Fifteen from there to the hospital. Lou was grim-faced; Josh, holding on to his smashed finger with his good hand, didn’t have the will to be cheery.
‘That fucking deck,’ he moaned, head against the window.
‘Fucking fucking fucking,’ chorused Stella in the back.
‘Well done, Josh,’ Lou said, and called, ‘Bad word, Stell,’ into the rear-view mirror.
‘Well, it’s going to kill me,’ he said. ‘It’s too big a job for me to do on my own.’
‘I never asked you to do it,’ Lou said quickly. ‘And certainly not on your own.’
‘Oh no, you never asked me.’ Josh’s chest was tight. Actually, he couldn’t remember the last time it wasn’t. ‘You just mentioned about a thousand times how much better the house would be if we could use the garden more, had somewhere to sit outside.’
‘Well, it would.’
‘Right.’
They’d been in the house almost eighteen months and Josh was still waiting for the day when he felt at home there. The day when he didn’t pull up in his ute and feel like he’d arrived at someone else’s house, somewhere they were house-sitting, maybe. A place that belonged to a cousin-made-good, or to a high school friend turned accountant.
He didn’t understand Lou in that house. That’s what it felt like. As if she wasn’t the same person there. She was suddenly cleaning all the time, and spent chunks of her evening on eBay trying to ‘win’ homewares that she somehow understood were a bargain but he couldn’t see a possible need for.
A planter on legs. Matching distressed bedside tables. A ladder that was really a towel rack.
How were these things that Lou knew about now?
*
The day they’d moved into the new house had been, for Josh, one of the most disorientating of his life.
His mother had come over. Annabelle and Brian too, of course, with a bottle of champagne. Even Rob.
They congratulated Lou and Josh as they stood among boxes – far too few for the amount of space they had to fill – and Stella toddled from room to room, uncovering life-threatening hazards as she went.
Bump. Into the doorframe. Waa. Down the step to the kitchen. Eek, onto the edge of the staircase.
Josh didn’t know what they were celebrating. Everyone there knew that they would never have been able to buy the house without Lou’s parents, so it hardly represented an achievement: to have asked for money and, with it, tethered themselves to a debt so enormous it made the soles of Josh’s feet sweat if he thought too much about it.
He’d said as much to Lou that night, as they went to bed for the first time in their new bedroom. Which was, he had to admit, an improvement on Erskineville – big and light and empty. And the yellow tree in the window cast a pleasing, dappled shadow. But, still.
‘Why is everyone congratulating us?’ Josh asked. ‘We didn’t do anything.’
‘We picked something,’ Lou said, turning onto her side and looking at him, her hands under her head. ‘We picked something, and now we have a plan.’
Josh looked at Lou – the woman he adored, the force of nature, the one he had always thought of as charging towards adventure – and he saw in her face that she really was
happy that they’d picked something. She wasn’t panicking about the mortgage and the debt and the monotony of the payments and what that meant for any choice they might make from here to eternity. She looked genuinely excited.
‘Is this your idea of adventure now?’ he asked. As soon as he did, he regretted it. It sounded patronising. Mean, even.
But she allowed him that little dig.
‘Well, sure,’ she said. ‘We’re here anyway, right? We’ve got Stell. No running off to the circus for us.’
And he nodded. But he felt, inexplicably, teary.
His mother knew it. All that day she’d been looking at him sideways as she and Lou unpacked things and tried to keep Stella alive while he built beds and tables with Rob, and Brian and Annabelle sat out in the garden on a couple of folding chairs, surveying what they had helped pay for.
‘You okay, Josh?’ she’d asked, appearing at the bedroom door as he unrolled the bed slats across the base.
‘Of course,’ he said, and looked up to give her what he hoped was a reassuring smile.
‘Don’t let all this get to you,’ she said. ‘It’s only a house, it’s only stuff. It doesn’t really change anything.’
And Josh knew she was thinking about his dad. As he had been. Sometimes he felt like he and everyone close to him were just waiting for that guy to come bursting out of Josh’s chest like the alien in that film. For Josh to show his true colours – the stripes of a selfish arsehole who couldn’t see when he had it good.
‘I know, Mum,’ he said, and turned back to the bed.
‘And it’s only money, too,’ she added. ‘Don’t let it colour things.’
‘Can you go and check Stella’s not fallen down the stairs again, please, Mum?’ he asked, as kindly as he could, and she left the room.
The truth was, he thought about his dad more now he was gone than when he’d only been a couple of hours’ drive away. Josh becoming a father at almost the exact same time he’d lost his own seemed like a strange coincidence to him. He knew his sister Maya believed it wasn’t a coincidence at all. That the universe was removing a barrier for him, an example he didn’t need. ‘You’re free to be the dad you want to be, Josh. History won’t repeat with you,’ his sister had said at the funeral, pulling him into a hug.
And Josh had squeezed her back but said nothing. Because it felt disloyal in the worst way to suggest that his own dad had to die for Josh to be able to be a good father. His old man might have been a dick, but Josh was capable of recognising that and choosing a different path, wasn’t he? Len could have stuck around for that.
It had become clear that sticking around wasn’t much of an option for Len, those last few years. He was deep in debt and his relationship with alcohol was growing more abusive by the week. He and Christine were pretty much homeless, crashing with her relatives and his dodgy friends, or staying in the kind of hotels you wouldn’t find on lastminute.com. Josh realised that a part of him had always romanticised the old man’s unconventional post-divorce lifestyle. Even while hating him for never being present for his children, he had nonetheless felt a grudging admiration for his dad’s ability to live life on his own terms, not caring enough what anyone thought to change. Not even caring what his own children thought.
Exactly what had happened on the night Len was hit by a car was still not clear. Christine’s version of events varied with each telling. The cops had clearly washed their hands of it and the driver of the car had been cleared of any wrongdoing. So what did that mean? That Len had stepped out in front of the car? On purpose?
Why was he thinking about this now? Josh had thought, with a surge of irritation at himself. Just when he was moving into this fancy new house with his incredible wife and their amazing little girl, such a ball of whirring energy. Why was he still thinking about his dad?
*
Josh’s head was still against the window of the station wagon. They were almost at the hospital, and Lou was talking.
‘Four weeks isn’t very long, Josh, and I feel like we’re not at all ready,’ she said. ‘I’m freaking out a bit, aren’t you?’
‘Hmmmm.’ Josh nodded, but he wasn’t really listening.
‘What about?’ Lou asked. ‘What are you worried about?’
‘Oh . . .’ Josh quickly flicked through a list of generic concerns in his head. Pick one; pick one quickly so it seems like you’re listening. This was interesting, he noticed: even with his hand throbbing and blood trickling down his arm, his desire not to upset Lou was paramount. ‘Money.’
‘Money.’ Lou flicked on the indicator to turn left into the hospital, and Josh could have sworn that the tick-tick of the turn signal was mirroring the tsk-tsking in her head, her irritation at Josh’s answer. ‘Money will be okay, Josh. We’ll go interest-only on the loan for a while. And I’m only taking six months’ leave with the baby this time.’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Josh, still holding up his hand.
‘Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,’ sang Stella in the back. ‘Baby, baby, baby.’
‘That’s right, Stell-stell, a new baby’s coming!’ Lou sang out. ‘How’s the hand feeling, Josh?’
‘Like I almost cut my finger off.’
‘How did you do it, anyway?’ Lou asked. ‘If you can tell me with little ears here,’ she added, tilting her head in Stella’s direction.
Josh thought about the moment before he drove the nail through his forefinger. He’d been thinking about how little he was feeling these days. How since they’d moved into the new house, he’d opted out of expressing his opinions on a whole range of things that he and Lou used to talk about all the time.
He moved through the shiny rooms in the new house like a visitor, trying not to upset things – order, routine, rows of ornamental owls – and it was one of the things he’d been thinking about today, as he stomped the boards down: was this what all men felt when children came? Was this what his dad had felt? Silenced? Was that where his rages had come from?
Josh had crouched down to nail the stomped board into place, as he had twenty times already that afternoon. He was hot, and a film of dust and grime from the wood had settled into his sweat. He felt coated in crap.
When Lou’s mum had heard that he was building the deck, she’d scoffed at the idea of Josh ‘making himself useful’, and although Lou had loyally scolded her for the comment, Josh couldn’t help but feel that was all they thought he was useful for, now: odd jobs and heavy lifting. And there was another baby coming. He had no idea if he could love this child as much as he loved Stella, but he was feeling more and more determined that he was going to change the way they did things with this one. He didn’t want to be on the sidelines anymore. He was here now, feeling like a stranger in his own house, but wanting to feel like he belonged again. To Lou, to his family, to this place.
Josh sized up the board and, just before he raised the hammer, he was hyper-aware of the weight in his chest, the sensation of feeling like he was moving slightly underwater, separated from what was happening right in front of him.
And the hammer had hit the nail, but the angle was wrong, and instead of pounding into the wood, the metal spike was driven into his flesh, and he’d pulled his hand back so quickly it had kind of ripped out of his finger, leaving an ugly gash. Josh hadn’t yelled out straight away, he’d stayed squatting on his haunches, staring at this jagged break in his skin, quickly filling and overflowing with blood. Oh, he thought. I can feel that.
‘My hand just slipped,’ he said to Lou in the car, as they pulled up outside the emergency department. ‘Stupid mistake. I must be tired.’
Lou let out a breath between pursed lips. ‘You’re tired,’ she said.
Josh felt a snap of fury. It frightened him. He had to get his shit together. ‘You can leave me here,’ he said. ‘I’ll get a cab home.’
He didn’t think Lou would go for it, but she did.
She turned to the back seat where Stella was beginning to droop a little. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Call me
if anything serious is happening.’ She didn’t really look at Josh as he pushed the handle down with his good hand and got out of the car.
‘See you, Stell,’ he said, bending into the back. ‘Be a good girl for Mummy. I’ll see you later.’
‘Later, later, Daddy.’ Stella blew him a big kiss.
I can feel that, he thought.
Lou flashed him an impatient half-smile and signalled for him to close the door. ‘Better go before I get moved on,’ she said. ‘Good luck.’
Josh closed the car door and, bloody tea towel–covered hand still raised, he watched as the station wagon pulled out and drove away.
Don’t think it, don’t think it, he told himself. But it was hard to ignore. There was zero chance that Lou would have left him at emergency on his own a couple of years ago, grown man that he was. She would have taken control, gone up to talk to the triage nurses, tried to make him laugh while they waited, emptied the vending machine of salt-and-vinegar chips and called his mum to update her. He didn’t need all that, he knew, but it had been pretty wonderful to have it.
Stop whining, Josh told himself; she’s about to have a baby. And the thought of that caught in his throat as he turned to walk through the automatic door to get a stitch.
Lou
Lou was running again. Treading the neighbourhood at a medium plod in the winter mornings, nodding at dog-walking neighbours and boomers doing tai chi in the park. With every footstep, every morning, she felt a little more herself.
She was glad she’d told Josh the truth about the year. She felt lighter. Less like she was carrying around an enormous secret. Josh, however, clearly thought what she was carrying around was an enormous ledger, ticking off pros and cons, keeping a running tally.
That morning, when she’d arrived home from her run at seven o’clock, panting, she found him ready to leave for work. To her surprise, the girls were not only up and out of bed but already in their school uniforms. Bowls and a cereal packet were on the kitchen table, and a coffee pod was ready and waiting in the coffee machine.
I Give My Marriage a Year Page 20
